“We Still Have a Choice Today: Nonviolent Coexistence or Violent Coannihilation” — MLK

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s prophetic words, uttered April 4, 1967, continue to haunt and challenge us. The wisdom, commitment to humanity, and charisma he embodied during his fleeting 39 years on this earth are badly needed now amid the ongoing proliferation of military aggression, killing machines and fomenting hate.

Dr. King would be 89 years old today, January 15, had his life not been taken prematurely 50 years ago. Thanks to Dr. William Pepper’s tireless and meticulous efforts over several decades, we have solid evidence that he was killed by agents of the US Army and Memphis Police, the jury’s unanimous conclusion after hearing months of testimony in a little-known 1999 civil trial brought by the King family.

Prior to King’s death, growing movements urged him to run for US President on a third party ticket or as Vice-presidential candidate to Presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy on the Democratic Party ticket. Either outcome would have positioned him well to lead the nonviolent social revolution he called for to re-orient society towards prioritizing the needs of the poor and vulnerable, an alarming prospect to the military establishment in service to the super-rich.

Dr. Pepper has a personal stake in uncovering the truth about the King assassination. The two became friends and colleagues in the antiwar movement after King read Pepper’s 1967 Ramparts Magazine article, “The Children of Vietnam” bringing Dr. King to tears and outrage.

The brutal Vietnam War was the focus of King’s opposition to militarism. In the introduction of his recent book, The Plot to Kill King, Pepper notes,

He would have shed equal tears had he been alive to witness what his beloved nation has been doing to the impoverished masses, not only of Iraq, but against Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and Syria… Vietnam was his Rubicon and it was here that he and I joined forces… Here, as never before, would he seriously challenge the interests of the power elite. Those interests all came down to money. The reader should keep in mind President Lyndon Johnson’s outburst at his CIA Vietnam briefer, Colonel John Downie, who in 1966 regularly urged him to get out of Vietnam. Finally in their ultimate session, a frustrated LBJ pounded the table and exclaimed: ‘I cannot get out of Vietnam, John, my friends are making too much money.’

Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, exposes the cruelty, hypocrisy and greed inherent in the US military involvement in Vietnam and its repercussions at home and around the world. This speech is widely available on the internet and is worth re-reading or watching and listening to in its entirety. Here are some key passages, best expressed in his own words:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men [in US cities], I have told them that… rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, ‘What about Vietnam?’ They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.

[US troops] must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit…

…our nation has taken the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values… When… profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries and say, ‘This is not just.”

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling difference is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nations homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today… We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.

As readers of Transcend Media Service, I’m sure all of you are working in many ways to promote the former. In the spirit of Dr. King, here are four points in this direction:

We need to keep raising consciousness about eliminating the excessive greed and profit motives that underlie so much of the violence in the world today. See my Nov. 6 TMS editorial, Quality of Life Floor and Wealth Ceiling: A House We Can All Live in. Even Pope Francis in his 2018 Epiphany address called for avoiding the pursuit of excessive money and resisting “inclinations toward arrogance, the thirst for power and for riches”; instead helping the poor and needy.

This past weekend (after press time), a major conference organized by the Coalition Against US Foreign Military Bases was held in Baltimore, Maryland, with the aim of educating people about the vast extent of US military presence around the world and mobilizing actions to shut down these bases and re-direct funds to more life-affirming purposes. All TMS readers living in a country with US military bases are invited to join the movement to send them packing!

North and South Korea are to be praised this past week for engaging in direct dialog and de-escalating the belligerent and hypocritical posturing of the US–hypocritical because the US refuses to get rid of any of its thousands of nuclear weapons, while insisting that North Korea disarm. Some cynics dismiss this rapprochement as a ploy by the North to divide Seoul and Washington, when it is the two Koreas that should be natural allies and the US really has no business meddling in their affairs.

While visiting North Korea in 2015, I learned the DPRK seeks reunification with their brothers and sisters in the south based on three principles:

Peaceful Means (mutual commitment to resolving issues nonviolently),

Federation (limited powers of central government with north and south retaining autonomy in many areas), and

Independence (negotiated by Koreans without foreign interference).

Seeing athletes from both North and South competing in the upcoming Winter Olympics in South Korea’s Pyeongchang County will send a strong and message of peace to the world.

North and South Korea at the 2017 World Figure Skating Championships in Helsinki. Photo: Marilyn Langlois

Today throughout the US there will be grassroots community events, celebrations, marches and days of service, which bring together people of all ages, races and walks of life to commemorate Dr. King’s legacy, working towards realizing his vision of the Beloved Community, his American Dream:

“A land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few.”

Dear Marilyn,
Thank you for your excellent article. Yes, I do want to stand on the side of nonviolent coexistence. I think it very interesting and important to know that the words “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannhilation” by Martin Luther King, Jr. were expressed in his speech made in 1967 titled “Beyond Vietnam.”
This reminds me of a civil movement in Japan called “Beheren” in Japanese meaning “Peace to Vietnam” formed in 1965, led and activated by a novelist Makoto Oda (1932-2007). What kind of person was he? I would like to quote here a paragraph from Howard Zinn “Just and Unjust Wars” (1991) as follows:
“I have a friend in Japan who was a teenager when the war ended. He lived in Osaka. He remembers very distinctly that on August 14, five days after the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese agreed to surrender on August 15. After Nagasaki, it was very clear that they were about to surrender in a matter of days. But on August 14 a thousand planes flew over Japan and dropped bombs on Japanese cities. He remembers on August 14, when everybody thought the war was over, the bombers coming over his city of Osaka and dropping bombs. He remembers going through the streets and the corpses and finding leaflets also dropped along with the bombs saying: the war is over”.
Oda named the corpses killed in Osaka on August 14,1945 “Nanshi”(the absurd death). He thought the concept of absurd death was very universal and kept the experience in his peace actions throughout his life. I had a chance to talk with him once. He advised me to read Homer.
Recently I have been assigned to be the representative of a subcommittee on nonviolence in the Peace Studies Association of Japan. We would like to learn more from the spirit of MLK in our efforts to resist nonviolently violence of all kinds.

Dear Akifumi Fujita,
Thank you so much for telling me about Makoto Oda and the Beheren movement in Japan. I had never heard of them, probably because my formal education in “good schools and colleges” did not include important examples like this that are outside of the US imperialist agenda. And the story of the young man in Osaka on Aug. 14, 1945 is truly heart-wrenching and infuriating.

Thank you for your work and please keep your eye on the prize: a dignified life for all–

Whilst also congratulating you on your article, I’d like to raise some points.

a) You say “Even Pope Francis in his 2018 Epiphany address called for avoiding the pursuit of excessive money and resisting “inclinations toward arrogance, the thirst for power and for riches”; instead helping the poor and needy.” I’d like to ask you “why doesn’t Pope Francis set the example? there is no organization in the world like the Vatican for “pursuing excessive money” and their “inclination toward arrogance, thirst for power and riches” has NEVER decreased. And when does the Vatican “help the poor and needy.”? they are only generous with others’ people money and even this, only after they feed themselves until “rien ne va plus”. Pope Francis, formerly Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, worked for years for the Vatican’s secret services (The Society of Jesus or Jesuits), promoted by Aristocracy and military dictators of Argentina.

Please look at photos of groups of Jesuits, members of The “Company” of Jesus or Opus Dei. 80% of them are overwight, many reqally obese.

Furthermore, please study the relationship between Church and Army and why Church Authorities BLESS Armed Forces, both the men and their weapons, tanks, bombardiers, etc. I plead with you to investigate the investment – share holding – of religious corporations in the military industry. You’ll quickly understand Peace goes against their business interests.

b) You rightly say “We need to keep raising consciousness about eliminating the excessive greed and profit motives that underlie so much of the violence in the world today.” It is true, there are many people who have far more than they need and many who don’t have enough, but we have to remember that “greed and profits” has been with us since humanity exists and will NOT go. But man’s inventions (machine guns, grenades, landmines, mortars, tanks, bombs, rockets, torpedoes, air-fighters, warships, drones, etc, etc) YES we can and SHOULD get rid of them.

Weapons are NOT a deterrent, weapons are for killing. Countries that don’t get involved in the fighting, are
nevertheless involved in wars, for the only way they can ‘update’ their Armed Forces is by selling the old stock to countries who wish to fight. Armed Forces for Peace are as ABSURD as Art Exhibitions for the blind or concerts for the deaf.

Dear Alberto,
Thank you for the important points you raise. You are right of course about the Catholic Church. I meant to indicate that at least the Pope paid lip service to the notion of sharing resources, though the organization he heads is very far from acting on that principle, with a few notable exceptions such as the Liberation Theology movement among some Catholics.

And as for greed as part of human nature, yes indeed, but note I said eliminating “excessive” greed. The levels of greed we are experiencing among today’s multi-billionaires and multi-millionaires is way out of balance and clearly pathological, like a cancer. Within healthy communities, people do have the tendency to cooperate and share (I’ve observed and experienced this myself countless times first hand), but even there, something could trigger a greedy reaction, and when that happens, the community needs to have ways of addressing it, like mediation, counsel by elders, etc.

Thank you for your work with HUFUD (Humanity United for Universal Demilitarization). Yes, let’s get rid of all the killing machines!